Description:
An alien ship rests over Water Island. For five years the people of the US Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of superadvanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. They are benevolent in many ways but meet any act of aggression with disproportional wrath. This has led to a strained relationship between the Ynaa and the local Virgin Islanders and a peace that cannot last.
A year after the death of a young boy at the hands of an Ynaa, three families find themselves at the center of the inevitable conflict, witnesses and victims to events that will touch everyone and teach a terrible lesson.
Brief description:
Cadwell Turnbull is the award-winning author of The Lesson and the Convergence Saga. His short fiction has appeared in The Verge, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Asimov's Science Fiction, and several anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 and Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. He has won both the Neukom Institute Literary Award and a Lambda Award, and been shortlisted for the VCU Cabell Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.
Review Quotes:
"If Frantz Fanon had written War of the Worlds, he might have produced something like Cadwell Turnbull's The Lesson...Turnbull shows with heartbreaking clarity that even when fundamentally different individuals are able to find an essential humanity in each other, the nature of colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized."
-- "The Rumpus"